Friday, December 7, 2012

On
the anniversary of the Japanese attack on the US naval base at Pearl
Harbor, with typhoon Bopha having just spread vast carnage throughout
the South China Sea, it is interesting to consider the parallels that
exist between the Japanese attack and such global warming-caused weather
events. Among their other similarities, both the attack on Pearl Harbor
and global warming-caused disasters result from the industrial,
imperialistic scramble for, and exploitation of natural resources. And
though the Japanese bombardment surprised many, but was not
unanticipated, likewise the typhoons, hurricanes, and other disasters
increasing in intensity and frequency throughout the world might come as
something of a surprise, but are not unanticipated in light of what we
know about climate change. Furthermore, if the Japanese attack led to an
alteration in the world social order, the ravages attending global
warming-caused events threaten a change of an even more radical
magnitude.

Remarkable for striking a region
that does not usually suffer from such storms, Typhoon Bopha is in this
respect similar to Hurricane Sandy - whose destruction has yet to be
corrected. Indeed, though it's been nearly six weeks since Superstorm
Sandy's landing, and one might think that the situation is returning to
normal (whatever 'normal' means these days), in actuality the
weather-caused displacements have yet to subside. For the tens of
thousands of people who have lost their homes, or are still living
without electricity or heat in these days of advancing winter, not only
do these conditions persist, recovery may still be months away; there is
not even any certainty that former conditions will ever be recovered.

While
it may be attributable to the neo-liberal program that neglects
collectively owned resources in order to induce their privatization, it
is nevertheless a fact that the State these days is hardly able to
maintain even its more mundane infrastructures (like bridges, roads,
sewage and public transportation systems, and nuclear power plants)
without the additional stresses wrought by "extreme weather" events. As
such, it doesn't seem too contentious to suggest that, as these
hurricanes and typhoons (as well as tornadoes, floods, fires,
droughts, and other harms) deliver their unrelenting combination blows
in the months and years ahead, the State's already limited capacities to
prepare and respond will become only more circumscribed. Inadequately
attended to, the wreckages wreathing Staten Island, Queens, and the
Jersey shore, among the other places hit by Sandy - not to mention the
places struck by Bopha - will not only fester, but will degenerate
further, adding inexorably to the planet's growing slum population.

Though
some will no doubt attribute such a conjecture to the unreasonably
fearful, or to the unreasonably hopeful (eager for the collapse of the
usurious system), the recognition of the advancement of catastrophic
environmental conditions by the infamously conservative insurance
industry, and the World Bank, ought to do much to deflect charges of
well-intentioned, but ultimately misled, alarm. The World Bank's
November, 2012 report, Turn Down the Heat, for instance, warns that
rising temperatures pose an imminent peril to not only its investments,
but to civilization itself. Current trends, their conservative report
warns, will likely lead to a temperature increase of four degrees
centigrade "as early as the 2060s." Such a rise in temperature would be
nothing short of cataclysmic for all but jellyfish. To be sure, most
climate scientists maintain that temperature increases above 3°C would
precipitate mass die-offs.

In some senses, then, the coming
"unprecedented heat waves, severe droughts, and major floods" warned of
in the World Bank's report, along with their attendant famines and
epidemics, may be likened to some sort of armada of hostile ships
approaching the planet. Landing singly for now, dispersed in time as
well as space, if drastic action is not taken it won't be long before
their masses land constantly, overwhelming efforts to resist. And while
the approach of such an armada, or any such assembly of threats, would
elicit alarm in any reasonable person, or government, the US government,
and the business powers it overwhelmingly represents, repeatedly
demonstrate their utter lack of 'reasonableness' by continuing to
practice their particularly venal brand of denialism. And though some in
power - like the World Bank, and various congresspersons - at least
recognize that there is a serious problem, aside from conceding that
"serious policy changes" need to be implemented, and that harms indeed
need to be "mitigated," such phrasing implies that they don't think
their economic system needs to be extirpated. Yet, it does; for
capitalist forms of economic and social organization not only obstruct
efforts to correct harmful conditions (of all sorts, including global
warming), but their normal functioning creates these very conditions in
the first place. That is, the armada of hostile ships referred to above
is not simply coming to attack us; its materials were mined, and
refined, and their parts were designed and built and launched by us as
well, in order to reap profits. And though many of these "ships" have
already been launched, stopping not only production, but changing the
system that compels people to produce unnecessary, harmful things in
order to simply survive, would not only limit the multiplication of such
disasters, and reduce the severity of those already on their way, it
would be a step in the direction of a just world as well.

While
in general public opinion is largely supportive of economic models that
halve - or even quarter - the length of the workweek, resistance to the
notion of abandoning cars, among other things that give rise to ecocide,
often elicit apoplectic reactions. Related to outbursts such as these,
it deserves mention that while they're predictably quiet regarding his
Disposition Matrix, and other actual abuses, the sensationalistic
denunciations of Republicans regarding Barack Obama's economic measures
(in spite of the latter's deep conservatism) veer into just this type of
reaction. Indeed, it is so vitriolic - insisting, among other things,
that his tepid health care reform would initiate so-called 'death
panels' - that in denouncing him in such a manner one would think that
Republicans would have used up their biggest rhetorical weapons. By
painting Obama not merely as a wild extremist, but as the Antichrist
himself, it is difficult to imagine what they could come up with that's
any worse. And should an actual radical political organization come
along at some point - with a truly radical platform - it leads one to
wonder what Republicans could offer in terms of denunciations that they
haven't already.

Beyond mirroring 'the boy who
cried wolf', by pursuing such an extreme type of rhetoric, it seems the
Republicans may have created a type of drama around 'No Drama Obama'
which has induced a type of Aristotelian catharsis among its audience.
By allowing audiences to purge their fears and passions in the safe and
abstract realm of fantasy, Aristotle maintained that drama prepared
audiences for an encounter with comparable events in reality. As such,
by way of just such a cathartic process, the Republicans may have,
ironically, to some degree, come to terms with the future arrival of a
radical, socialist government.

Democrats, on the other hand,
exposed to an entirely different narrative, see a wholly different
picture. According to their story, Obama is a reasonable - even wise -
leader whose efforts at establishing "a more perfect union" are
repeatedly stymied by obstructionist Republicans - even when Democrats
held a supermajority in congress. In addition to overlooking the
peculiar fact that the two parties share virtually identical world
views, this story also fails to consider that reasonable persons would
not only not ignore the cataclysmic ecological exigencies confronting
us, but would actively pursue energy and economic policies designed to
correct these. Yet Obama, who neglects to pursue such an agenda, and
actively abets the business community's worst practices, somehow
continues to present himself as a reasonable person (just as he
misrepresented himself as an agent of change) and somehow manages to be
taken seriously. Indeed, his (and the Republicans) neglect of advancing
ecological catastrophe is of such severity, and such a breach of
responsibility, that it ought to be indictable as a crime against
humanity. However, Obama and company no doubt sleep well, aware that the
International Criminal Court in The Hague, along with the rest of The
Netherlands, will most likely be well under water in no time. In spite
of all of this, as it is spelled out over much of the mass media, the
Democrats' political fantasy regarding Obama's reasonableness is not so
easily dispelled.

So, though Republicans' hyperbole
couldn't grow more volatile (what is worse than charges of Hitlerism?),
and couldn't impede Obama more than they already do, it seems the actual
obstacle to a more progressive Obama - as has been apparent all along -
is not the unreasonableness of the Republicans, but the very
unreasonableness of Obama and the Democrats. And though the Democrats
would rejoin that they are being entirely reasonable, they seem to be
unable to comprehend that their particular variety of reasonableness is
itself subordinated to the overarching unreasonableness involved in
organizing the world according to the priorities of business interests.

To some degree this dynamic may be
elucidated through reference to Freud's Reality Principle. Unlike
thinkers from Spinoza to the Marquis de Sade, and beyond, who maintained
that human behavior is motivated by the pursuit of pleasure (what Freud
called the Pleasure Principle), and the avoidance of what causes pain,
Freud maintained that something else is involved. Like the Old Stoics of
the Hellenistic period, who held that people are not motivated so much
by pleasure as by the pursuit of a greater harmony, one in which
suffering is sometimes necessary, Freud maintained a similar thing
(although his notion of harmony is of a particularly bourgeois cast).
Because the unrestricted pursuit of pleasure ultimately leads to pain,
he argued, it too had to be limited - by what Freud termed the Reality
Principle.

Among other stories, Aesop's fable of the Grasshopper and the Ants illustrates this dynamic. An
arguably more sophisticated telling of this, however, is rendered in
the story of The Three Little Pigs. Readers may recall that the little
pigs who pursued pleasure most - slap-dashedly constructing their homes
from straw and sticks - saw their homes destroyed by the predations of
the wolf. Meanwhile, the more responsible pig, who had internalized the
Reality Principle, who deferred pleasure in order to build a sturdy
house of bricks, not only prevailed over, but succeeded in eating the
wolf.

While it may be a shortcoming of these
stories - which instruct children on the merits of being good ants
(workers), and pigs (consumers) - in their ascriptions of
reasonableness, or of a Reality Principle, to Obama, his proponents
reveal a profound one. For the purported Reality Principle of Obama is
in actuality subordinated to the system's incessant drive for growth and
consumption - a drive leading not only to the world-wrecking ravages of
global warming, but to epidemics of stress, heart-disease, cancer,
famine, war, and other ills. That is, while the moderation, and thrift
of the historical middle classes may continue to function ideologically
(as internalized domination), these are firmly in the service of what
Freud would describe not even as the Pleasure Principle, but what in his
later writings he termed the Death Drive.

Opposed to
survival, and the other creative drives, according to Freud the Death
Drive is "an urge in organic life to restore an earlier [inorganic]
stage of things." In dominating the natural, as well as the social
world, deforming the living and natural world into inorganic commodities
and waste, rather than exemplifying the Pleasure Principle, or the
Reality Principle, contemporary social organization seems to be
manifesting the aggressive destructiveness wrapped up in just this urge.

And
though Freud held that the aggressive destructiveness of the Death
Drive was an innately human phenomenon, he nevertheless contended that
it could be overcome by way of a type of social Reality Principle, one
rooted not in the destructive power of Thanatos, but in the generative,
healing force of Eros. Indeed, it is interesting to point out that in
addition to representing Armageddon, or the end times, the notion of
apocalypse also means revelation, or unconcealment. As such, one may
argue that the revelation, or unconcealment of the actual, ecocidal
harms attending the present socioeconomic system (concealed by the
culture industry) would instantiate apocalypse not in the sense of
ending the world in general so much as contributing to the end of this
particular form of social organization.

As this
Death Drive hurtles us toward ecological holocaust, it is interesting
to consider that rather than by opposing it by force - which only ever
enhances its strength - we can deprive this drive of its power not so
much by working (like the dead), but, rather, like Eros, by playing
dead. For, though the forces of domination are far more dangerous than,
say, a bear, or a bee, by playing dead, by refusing to participate - by
removing our bodies from the gas pedal, withdrawing not only our 'moral'
support, but our actual physical energy and labor from its reproduction
of harms - by not paying our bills, among other things - like a fire
deprived of its fuel, this system of death will soon slow and expire.
And the armada of disasters advancing toward us - whose attack should
not come as any surprise - will by and by dissipate. What do we have to
lose, but our diseases?